The present invention relates to an automated test position monitoring and notification system and, more particularly, to a monitoring system capable of continuously analyzing thousands of "test sockets" and notifying a system user of failures associated with the sockets.
In the manufacture of various devices, for example, electrical or optoelectronic devices, a variety of tests are performed to assess the operability of the devices. At times, multiple devices may be tested simultaneously, with a number of different test points accessed on each device. In such a situation, the multiple devices may be held in a single test fixture (each device held within a separate socket), with a set of test probes used to contact each separate device. At times, one or more sockets within the test fixture may fail the failure indicated by test results that are out of a "normal" expected range. Such a result may also occur from a malfunctioning device. Therefore, it is often difficult to ascertain the source of the failure between the test socket and the device itself. The ability to find the source of such a failure in "real time" becomes essentially impossible when thousands of devices are being tested simultaneously. As a result, "good" devices may be scrapped as "failures" when being tested in a malfunctioning socket.
At this time, manually recovered data associated with various test sockets may be used to determine the site of "failed" sockets. However, by the time this data is collected and analyzed, many devices may have already been loaded and tested in one or more failed sockets.
Thus, a need remains for a system capable of quickly realizing the location of failed test sockets and alerting user to remove the socket from the test fixture or repair the same.